Clift: A Cautionary Note About Hillary Clinton

Republican Dick Armey says he has sat up nights hoping, dreaming, wishing—trying to find a way Hillary Clinton will lose the presidential race. But he can't come up with a convincing scenario. He finds the former First Lady, with whom he tangled when he was House majority leader, the most able politician in the race, even the country. She's going to win, he says flatly. "I can't tell you how heartbreaking that is."

Armey is now with Piper Rudnick, a lobbying law firm, and he shared the dais Monday—at a panel hosted by the firm—with another politician turned lobbyist, Democrat Dick Gephardt, and political analyst Charlie Cook. Armey wisecracked his way through the discussion, declaring that Barack Obama would make a great faculty president, where he could be sociologist-in-chief and hold forth in the lounge with the "brain-numbing tripe" that Armey, a former college professor, says passes for conversation in the rarefied air of academia. Hillary is smarter than everybody else—"and meaner," he says.

Gephardt stayed true to form, his boy-scout image untarnished and his ambitions unfulfilled in two presidential runs. He recalled somewhat wistfully spending 300 days in Iowa, essentially moving his family to the state, yet by Christmas he was last in the polls. It took an audacious holiday advertising blitz to vault him to first place on caucus night in February 1988—an upset of sorts, but not nearly as big a story as the tale on the GOP side, which had televangelist Pat Robertson coming in ahead of Vice President George H. W. Bush, who was struggling to emerge from President Reagan's shadow. The media focus on the Republicans denied Gephardt the traditional Iowa bounce, and he soon fell by the wayside, unable to buy enough television time to compete in the Super Tuesday sweepstakes. In 2004, needing to win Iowa to remain viable, Gephardt self-destructed after engaging in a series of negative exchanges with then-front runner Howard Dean, opening the door to a surging John Kerry.

Here we go again. It's all about Iowa. If Hillary wins it's over, Cook said. Even if she doesn't, she's still favored to go the distance. Obama hasn't sufficiently filled in the picture of himself. In Cook's view "the experience thing kills him." Edwards would have to do really well to overcome the blowback from being the primary aggressor against Clinton. He rightly pounced after she left an opening in last week's Democratic debate, when she seemed to say yes, no and maybe to the idea of states providing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Her campaign, always poised to counterattack, implied she was being victimized because she is a woman. Clinton quickly pivoted, saying the guys were after her "because I'm winning." Still, the brief exchange drew blood. It was the first detour in a campaign that Cook singled out for what he called its "Prussian efficiency." That's meant as a compliment from the perspective of a political operative but has sobering implications for what lies ahead should Clinton win the White House. Cook is not alone in comparing the buttoned-down Clinton campaign to the Nixon campaign of 1968, which is remembered not at all fondly for its scripted distance from the press and its skillful use of the media. The cover of Joe McGinniss's "The Selling of the President" showed Nixon's face on a pack of cigarettes.

Unlike Nixon, Hillary isn't selling herself as something she isn't. Her campaign reflects the person she is, disciplined and focused, machinelike in her ability to forge ahead. It's what voters look for in a president, a toughness of mind and body. Her campaign is a little cold, a little joyless, but what Clinton lacks in spontaneity she makes up for in sheer competence. She has absorbed the lessons of the White House and the Senate, and there's not much that can stump her. Besides, Cook quipped, her campaign is so tightly organized, they'll probably come up with a plan to make her look spontaneous. In the meantime she has adopted the Woody Allen School of campaigning ("90 percent of life is just showing up"), grinding it out day after day, working to neutralize her critics.

Democrats have a huge advantage over Republicans on issues and party identification in this election cycle, polls show. Yet Hillary is in a virtual tie with her leading Republican rival, Rudy Giuliani, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey that found that voters have reservations about Clinton's truthfulness in the wake of Democratic accusations that she is evasive and engages in double-talk. For Democrats these match-ups are too close for comfort. For Republicans they illuminate a race they know how to run, against a candidate whose long stay on the political stage has left her with high negatives. "They're pumping the sewage back up to the surface, that's what the right-wingers are doing," says one Republican source who asked not to be identified talking about GOP strategy. And in a tight race that's worth a point or two, enough to keep Democrats sitting up nights worrying that Hillary is no sure winner.